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They should get Demiurge to do the port, they translated the first Mass Effect pretty well to PC( much better than Bioware did with 2, haven't played 3), except for the whole Garrus face texture thing.

...I often have to try an area over and over especially when I face new enemies. But now the more common enemies seem so much easier than they did when I first started, because their timing and attack patterns have been drilled into me. And it's so satisfying to finally beat a tough enemy, I think you'd lose that if you could quicksave everywhere.

QTF

Some players love that feeling of achievement at having mastered a difficult task and that is why they game, that is their fun. Other players just like to hear a story and finish a game without frustration. You cannot have a game that does both with excellence, you just can't. Putting difficulty sliders and quicksaves in any game means that they will be used, and those two things would fundamentally change the DS games and put them into the 98% of games that are afraid to frustrate any player. The DS games then lose their market differentiation and become one of the Amalurs etc. that bore me to tears.

The challenge/matery player is woefully under-served in today's market of big budget games and that's why the souls games have made a name for themselves. They aren't particularly brilliant games (innovation/writing/art/gameplay/etc), nor did they have a massive budget. But they unapologetically serve the segment of the market that wants uncompromising challenge/mastery, and that is pretty damn rare today.

Quick saves would completely destroy the entire point of playing the game. It would be like playing the original Super Mario game, only every time you fell in a pit, they respawned you right in front of the jump you just missed, instead of making you play through the level again.

This is how Dark Souls plays now:

"Oh, a fog wall. There's probably going to be a boss behind it. It's very likely I will be killed. This is intense."

*Enter fog wall. Giant boss comes charging toward you. You die.

"Damn. I just dropped all my souls (XP and currency). If I don't make it back to my bloodstain without dying again, they're gone for good. This is REALLY intense."

*Spend 10-15 minutes fighting your way back to the boss, enter the fog wall. Giant boss comes rushing towards you. You rush to reclaim your dropped souls. SUCCESS. The boss is on you. You begin to recognize his attack patterns and even do a fair amount of damage to him. You die.

"Damn. Not only did I just drop all the souls I JUST reclaimed, but I stand to lose the additional souls I picked up on my way back to the boss as well. The stakes just keep going up (This process can repeat itself several times as you learn a boss encounter).

*Spend 10-15 minutes fighting your way back to the boss, enter the fog wall. Giant boss comes rushing towards you. You rush to reclaim your dropped souls. SUCCESS. The boss is on you. You know his attack patterns and expertly block and roll out of the way of his attacks. The boss dies.

"Wow! What an extremely rewarding feeling to have finally conquered this challenging foe."

The current system works fine, it saves constantly. Quick-saving would undermine the mechanics of the entire game. The whole risk/reward, satisfying challenge part of it would be reduced to nothing. Be careful what you wish for in regards to this.

Quick saves would completely destroy the entire point of playing the game. It would be like playing the original Super Mario game, only every time you fell in a pit, they respawned you right in front of the jump you just missed, instead of making you play through the level again.

This is how Dark Souls plays now:

"Oh, a fog wall. There's probably going to be a boss behind it. It's very likely I will be killed. This is intense."

*Enter fog wall. Giant boss comes charging toward you. You die.

"Damn. I just dropped all my souls (XP and currency). If I don't make it back to my bloodstain without dying again, they're gone for good. This is REALLY intense."

*Spend 10-15 minutes fighting your way back to the boss, enter the fog wall. Giant boss comes rushing towards you. You rush to reclaim your dropped souls. SUCCESS. The boss is on you. You begin to recognize his attack patterns and even do a fair amount of damage to him. You die.

"Damn. Not only did I just drop all the souls I JUST reclaimed, but I stand to lose the additional souls I picked up on my way back to the boss as well. The stakes just keep going up (This process can repeat itself several times as you learn a boss encounter).

*Spend 10-15 minutes fighting your way back to the boss, enter the fog wall. Giant boss comes rushing towards you. You rush to reclaim your dropped souls. SUCCESS. The boss is on you. You know his attack patterns and expertly block and roll out of the way of his attacks. The boss dies.

But what happens if you don't make it back and get those souls? You're presenting the ideal outcome, but being naff at games I'd probably die repeatedly on the way back to my body, so what happens then? I imagine it'd be something annoying enough for me to quit and play something else...

But what happens if you don't make it back and get those souls? You're presenting the ideal outcome, but being naff at games I'd probably die repeatedly on the way back to my body, so what happens then? I imagine it'd be something annoying enough for me to quit and play something else...

Then the game is not for you.

That's all there is to it. It ups the drama of the game when dying has real consequences. As someone who has played Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, quicksaves are literally the worst idea for a game like it. Just trust in the design. It's hard to get into, but harder still to put down once you're into it. Although I thought Demon's Souls was more accessible at the beginning.

But what happens if you don't make it back and get those souls? You're presenting the ideal outcome, but being naff at games I'd probably die repeatedly on the way back to my body, so what happens then? I imagine it'd be something annoying enough for me to quit and play something else...

Then you suck. If you're entering these games with a "Awww, it'll be too hard and I'll give up" mentality, they are definitively not for you.

Soul gain goes up exponentially, and you get megasouls for defeating a boss whether you lost your corpse runs doing it or not, so losing all your souls is not a long-term blow. Devastating in the moment it happens, yes. If you never want to fail, then Dark Souls isn't for you.

I asked earlier in this thread and got an idea of the differences, but while you're here...are there any major differences between them? Anything you really wish one had that the other did? I worry Dark Souls might be missing out on something -- atmosphere, a mechanic (like the penalties for death in Demon's Souls) or etc. Is my worrying ill-founded? I only played Demon's Souls for about 15 minutes and loved it. Just don't want to feel shortchanged, I guess.

Having to keep trying until you win is how EVERY boss works in EVERY game. EVER.
Having to run back and forth to try each time is the equivalent of the unskippable cutscene. It isn't difficult, it's just tedious.

And if you've got a big pile of souls going into a boss fight you're silly anyway. If you've cleared a path somewhere then the path back to the bonfire is clear - go spend them. Then, you're just carrying the souls to get from the bonfire to the boss (if you even bother killing things) and it's a trivial loss.

The reason it doesn't need quicksaves is that everything is autosaved anyway. The only thing you EVER lose is souls. And the only loss that represents is time.

Originally Posted by Phantoon

Then the game is not for you.

.

It's... really not that hard. At all. Middling reflexes and middling patience will get you through no problem. There are very, very broken combinations in both games, should you happen to stumble onto one of them.

Dark Souls wants to be a balls-hard extreme (to the max!!1!) challenge. The difficulty is a major part of it's identity. Diluting that with quicksaves would be a mistake. That said, I hope nobody here mistakes difficulty as an integral part of gaming. Because it really isn't. Like, at all. Hasn't been for decades. Yes it's a legitimate design choice, but there are also many many other ways to go. It is not the be all end all.

I have no problem with the idea of an easy mode in DS, but they'd need to make it very clear that it is not the intended way to play the game. While there is some nice scenery and enough variety that some people would enjoy hacking their way through with no challenge, the challenge is really what sets it apart from its competitors.

It gets compared to roguelikes even though it's mechanically very different (preset levels, not really permadeath) because of the mentality. It reminds me of Nethack which I've been playing for years but never completed. That has a cheat mode which could be used to see the end of the game if I wanted to, but why would I? If I want a story or an adventure there's many games that do it much better, but if I want a challenge there's far less to choose from.

I worry Dark Souls might be missing out on something -- atmosphere, a mechanic (like the penalties for death in Demon's Souls) or etc. Is my worrying ill-founded?

I prefer Dark Souls, but at times it felt like they were being deliberately unfair instead of simply challenging. As the most obvious example:

Navigation in Dark Souls is all about the bonfires and there are a couple of points where they go out of the way to hide them from you. One is over an edge you have no other reason to go near while you're being attacked continuously from range and the other is behind a secret wall, Doom style - it looks like every other wall but when you hit it the wall vanishes and reveals something.

The curse in Dark Souls is probably too cruel. Multiple curses would leave you trapped somewhere getting one-shot by anything that moved. It's your own fault but it's far worse than the world tendency shifts you saw in Demon's Souls.

Demon's Souls was certainly tough to learn but it never felt as punitive. Having said that, Dark Souls drops the hub and is a much better game for it. The hub felt like returning home between dungeons, whereas in Dark Souls your only safety is the 10 foot circle around a bonfire. There's more variety in the world design (yes, even some colour) and losing the clearly delineated level boundaries is definitely a plus if you like exploring.

Travelling between the bells early on, there's a great sequence of levels descending from the top of a city to the bottom of a plague-filled chasm. The city feels dingy and ruined but by the time you're done with the second bell it feels sparkly clean. There aren't many games that can make simply seeing the sun and sky such a relief. Yes, there's a zone in the middle there that the game engine doesn't cope with at all but it's still a fantastic bit of level design.

Demon's Souls might have had the ruined city in world 1, the dungeon in world 3 and the swamp in world 5 but it doesn't come close to the atmosphere Dark Souls manages. Part of that is simply from the fact that once you're halfway down the descent you either have to carry on to the bottom or return through all the levels you just passed, knowing you'll need to clear back to here if you flee.

Yes, I did the sewers, Blighttown and the swamp cursed simply so I didn't have to go back to the surface to remove the curse. That hurt, but Demon's Souls never manages to capture the same feeling that motivated playing on so crippled.

That's all there is to it. It ups the drama of the game when dying has real consequences. As someone who has played Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, quicksaves are literally the worst idea for a game like it. Just trust in the design. It's hard to get into, but harder still to put down once you're into it. Although I thought Demon's Souls was more accessible at the beginning.

It's one of those flow inducing games (see below for one definition of flow). I think the reason most games don't follow this game design is because flow games require a learning curve and persistence before the fun happens. That is, you have to master the required game skills before you flow.

And then the question becomes how many potentials customers will wants to spend 10 hours (or whatever) working at skill mastery before the payoff comes? I wonder if that is why these types of games don't get funded by big publishers and big massive games like SWTOR do. It is much easier to sell fun with zero effort games.

The outcome of Flow is that the ego, or self-consciousness, disappears, after which people report feeling stronger and more vital (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). Research participants of Flow report feeling best when skills and challenges are both high, and tend to be negative, regardless of the activity, if challenges and skills are low...

Flow researchers have found that the worst moments in an individualís day-to-day life are when he or she is self-conscious. Typically, when individuals reach a certain point of concentration, they describe feeling a sense of complete absorption [i.e. stop being self conscious].

When...the challenges...exceed the individualís skills [it] results in anxiety and stress; and those who feel challenges do not engage an individualís skills the individual becomes bored...

I think that people are too focused on the "OMG this is the hardest game ever" hype that surrounds Dark Souls. The truth of the matter is that the game is not hard at all once you figure out how to play it. And that's the main challenge of the game in a lot of ways, because it goes against general convention of other action games, which reward you for risk and keeping combos up or whatever.

But that's not Dark Souls, careful play and patience are rewarded, not rushing in and trying to hack everything to pieces as fast as possible like in every other game. Tactics often boil down to pulling enemies individually, finding their weak spots, and timing your attacks. And in my opinion this is much more rewarding than any other action oriented game. It makes you think first, then act; instead of just playing to your reptilian impulses.

I think that people are too focuses on the "OMG this is the hardest game ever" hype that surrounds Dark Souls. The truth of the matter is that the game is not hard at all once you figure out how to play it. And that's the main challenge of the game in a lot of ways, because it goes against general convention of other action games, which reward you for risk and keeping combos up or whatever.

But that's not Dark Souls, careful play and patience are rewarded, not rushing in and trying to hack everything to pieces as fast as possible like in every other game. Tactics often boil down to pulling enemies individually, finding their weak spots, and timing your attacks. And in my opinion this is much more rewarding than any other action oriented game. It makes you think first, then act; instead of just playing to your reptilian impulses.

This is very true. I made some bad leveling and gear choices on my first character, and was having a really rough time of it. I decided to start a new character. I think it only took about 2 hours, and no deaths to get back to where my first character was on his 8 hour save, with dozens and dozens of deaths. Even now that I am in the late game, probably about 80% of the way through, I find that I almost always kill a new boss on my first or second try. The game teaches you very early on that if you just run in mashing attack, you will die. Once you learn to keep your shield up and study your opponent, the encounters become much more manageable. There's nothing like approaching a fog wall with tons of player signs like "Imminent death" or "Despair ahead" only to go in there and totally own the boss on your first try.

"What were we talking about? Pegasuses, pegasii, that's horses with wings. This motherf*cker got a sword that talks to him. Motherf*cker live in places that don't exist, it comes with a map. My God."

I asked earlier in this thread and got an idea of the differences, but while you're here...are there any major differences between them? Anything you really wish one had that the other did? I worry Dark Souls might be missing out on something -- atmosphere, a mechanic (like the penalties for death in Demon's Souls) or etc. Is my worrying ill-founded? I only played Demon's Souls for about 15 minutes and loved it. Just don't want to feel shortchanged, I guess.

I wouldn't say it is missing out on anything at all, the death penalties in Demon's Souls were almost negated with the cling ring (which reapplied about 80% of the half of the bar you lose.) It was so apparent you would spend most of each area dead it just stayed on, which has been replaced by a penalty to damage resistance in DaSo while hollow (dead.)
Also, you could completely spam world 1-1 wiping the lame dead guys out then warping to and from the hub for massive amounts of health and magic supplies in about 15 minutes, which made it great for powering through but removed a lot of the challenge.
In this one you only refill your limited cast magic and health flask at bonfires, so you have to decide wether to respawn everyone to get supplies, or tough it out. The bosses in the original were easier to cheese too.

I personally think the structure has been improved all round, and they have made it harder and fairer at the same time. The level design is better in some ways in the new one although I loved the asylum in DeSo. But DaSo has a semi open world and is probably more fun to traverse.

I personally think the structure has been improved all round, and they have made it harder and fairer at the same time.

I actually thought it was a little less fair than Demon's Souls. The bonfire hiding felt like them wanting to screw you for not looking up where to go. No spoilers, but I suspect you'll know which ones I mean. Putting one over an edge you don't really have time to look over might be a reward for diligent exploration but putting one behind a Doom style wall that you have no reason to suspect is fake while in the middle of one of the most dangerous zones is just cruel.

The curses felt punitive rather than fun. Demon's Souls had world tendency shifts if you were alive but they pale next to having to do entire zones at 50% (or less) health because you didn't happen to know what those enemies did and that you should've picked up some items before you ventured there. Similarly, New Londo could've been really nice but the ghost system just caused frustration. I felt punished for exploring new areas because I might waste some precious items to a dead end (no, I never got one of the weapon drops).

That said, I do prefer it to Demon's Souls in many ways. The removal of the hub changes your feeling of safety completely. If everything went wrong in Demon's Souls you could always return to the hub and try something else. Getting stuck in Blight Town when you can't go forward and don't want to lose hours of progress going backwards is something that the first one never captured well. World 5 wasn't pleasant but I never felt trapped like I did after getting hit with yet another toxin dart in Blight Town.

The sequence of levels from ringing the first bell down to the second bell and back to sunlight is some of the best world design I've seen in a long time. Ok, not so much the framerate down there, but y'know. I've rarely been so grateful to see some sky again. Going down to the Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith lost out to the simple urge to see the sun again, those opening levels feeling a whole lot cleaner.

Demon's Souls had some great levels but they never felt connected. Sure, you had the ruined city, the dungeons, the swamps and the lava pits but they don't come close to the way that Dark Souls is put together.